from Crikey …..

Jeff Sparrow, editor of Overland writes:

If you’re Richard Fuld, the chairman of Lehman Brothers, what’s not to like?

You get to keep your Greenwich mansion, your Park Avenue co-op, your estate on Jupiter Island and the $40 million you earned in the last year alone.

Not only do you face no penalties or recriminations, the government whisks away all the losses for which you and your pals are responsible, and dumps them squarely on the laps of everyone else.

The Calculated Risk blog puts it like this:Unless there is a dramatic change, there will be no upside participation in the financial companies for taxpayers, and the taxpayers will recapitalize the banks by, in Krugman's words, ‘having taxpayers pay premium prices for lousy assets’.

We’re talking, in other words, about a huge transfer of the liabilities from some of the world’s richest people to ordinary American workers, who will be handed something like a $20,000 debt each.

Despite the Chronicle, this is not a nationalisation in any traditional sense, since the population doesn’t actually receive anything for their money. Rather than becoming more transparent, the financial sector seems about to become less so.

As Newsweek says, "The prospect of unelected officials putting massive amounts of taxpayer resources to work without transparency or approval from Congress, and without a clear process at work, is indeed troubling."